


Fall of the House of Usher

by The_Carnivorous_Muffin



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling, Kuroshitsuji | Black Butler
Genre: Angst, Attempted Murder, Canon - Anime, Family, Gen, Horror, Murder
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-08-06
Updated: 2018-12-18
Packaged: 2019-06-23 00:41:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 6
Words: 17,237
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15594420
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/The_Carnivorous_Muffin/pseuds/The_Carnivorous_Muffin
Summary: At the age of seven Harry Potter summons the demon once known as Sebastian Michaelis under a different master and must grow to face his own warped destiny knowing that all roads lead to the jaws of a black bird.





	1. Chapter 1

There were no true dark rituals.

The burning incense, virgin sacrifices, chanting faceless men, these were superfluous details added in for the razzle dazzle.  Power was contained in the simplest and most basic of actions, a wish that rises above all others until it was all but screaming, in the end it was not the wand waving or the written runes that would make the difference.

Harry James Potter summoned the monster that would massacre his relatives without a conscious thought when he was only seven years old.

There’d been no real build up to the event, he’d been unhappy anyone could see that, but he hadn’t been filled with hatred. His life had been too monotonous for any anger to fester and if he felt any strong emotions at all it was the pang of loneliness for his dead parents and a wish that maybe one day his family would come to love him.

Still it happened all the same.

He’d been in his cupboard, thrown in after some unimportant event featuring the dreaded funny business, gripping his knees with white knuckles wishing that he could just get out and go. Oh, the places you’ll go, if only he could get out. It was perhaps the most genuine prayer to an unresponsive God that he had ever made in his life. Please, let me out.

As a seven year old, a child, he could not really be held accountable for the bargain he made. The specifics over time became lost and almost unnecessary. It was known that there was a raven under the stairs that day that it peered at him with eyes the color of mulberries, and together they made a covenant whose nebulous wish was as unclear as it was desperate. Years later it would become difficult to even remember if there was a wish at all only that there was a seal etched in purple on his left hand in the shape of a pentagram and that it bound him to the other tie surer than any leash ever could.

He did remember his first order.

“I want to go home.”

He had not yet started wearing glasses but even so his vision was blurred by tears as he addressed the tall, dark haired, red eyed man who stared down at him with that leering inhuman expression. His clothes itched against his skin and the thin mattress he was sitting on creaked when he shifted and somehow even though he had always lived in Number 4 Privet Drive he knew it wasn’t really home for him.

The man with the red eyes had smiled, taken both of Harry’s hands into his, folding his own black nailed fingers over them and said, “Of course, young master, all you had to do was ask.”

The demon had not been summoned for his comfort or his mental wellbeing it had been summoned to fulfill a contract. In that first moment the boy hadn’t realized that his new friend was not a he but an it, the demon’s first action was to remedy that misjudgment.

It was over before the boy had even made it out of the unlocked door so that when he stepped into the living room it was like stepping into the fires of Guernica where the walls were dripping with blood.

He stood there, blankly, his soul erased as he took in the dull horror of severed limbs and pumping arteries of fresh corpses. His fingers twitched and his jaw clicked as words and lifeless screams failed to pass through his dry throat.

“I couldn’t very well leave them alive, young master; it would be negligent to overlook the injustices done to you. It was why I was summoned after all.”

(It was not why he was summoned, they both knew that, but the boy could hardly say anything at that point and the demon was hardly willing to contradict himself.)

The demon in the guise of a bird in the guise of a man walked over to him and once again took the boy’s hand with that same smile, “Now then, I believe you wanted to go home?”

One day, years later, an old man told him that he would accomplish great things with the brother wand of a dark lord. He thought of himself, sitting alone in the cupboard, when outside the walls were painted in blood.

Great things were also in some way terrible.


	2. Chapter 2

Severus Snape’s first thought on seeing Harry Potter was that despite being quite small for his age, his large green eyes, and his pale delicate features he looked old. It was an artificial age, one that showed itself in the shadows beneath the eyes, in the grim set of his smile, and in the inherent distrust of strangers.

The house itself was interesting; for one thing it was not a house but a shop, a very old one by the look of it. Located on the edge of London’s east end it seemed to have that shady criminal edge to it that deterred customers. Harry Potter had caught him outside staring at the sign, his first words to Severus weren’t asking who he was or if he was looking for someone, but instead “It’s a funeral parlor.”

The inside was rather dusty, filled with coffins but also with several oddities like beakers and jars of unknown materials that Severus hesitated to think were muggle in nature. When he first met Potter there wasn’t an adult in sight.

The boy was oddly dressed by the most eccentric of standards, wearing clothing that was well made and durable but in clashing bright colors, his left hand was covered by a thin fingerless glove but there was nothing on his right. The boy looked at him though with eyes that reminded him not of the Death Eaters but the more war harrowed Order members who had escaped a little more jaded but alive at the end of it.

It was good, he supposed, to see that the boy was indeed alive as Albus’ instruments had predicted. Severus wasn’t sure how he felt about the prospect of Harry Potter being alive, he had been torn for many years on the subject. His instinct reaction was that Potter’s son didn’t deserve to live, that those genetics should not be passed on into the world, and that if Lily had to die then her son whose life she had sacrificed hers for should also perish. Thinking deeper on it though he would always see Lily, Lily who in the end his actions had killed when he told the dark lord o fhis prophecy, and he couldn’t help but feel some small amount of shame that he hated her son without ever having laid eyes on him.

At the time Severus didn’t want to think about that though, instead he moved onto his next task presented by Albus, discovering who had taken Harry in and what had happened on that night in 1987 when the Dursleys were found in pieces. Those questions had been resounding in their minds for five years and no matter the divination techniques or tracking charms they used they could not find an answer as to where young Harry Potter was if he was not strewn among the living room with his relatives.

(He had seen many corpses in his tenure as a dark wizard, many muggle bodies hurled into a corner as if they were pieces of trash, but that scene in Number 4 Privet Drive had imprinted itself into his memory as being one of the most brutal he had witnessed. Part of his reluctance in coming to face Harry Potter did not extend from his hatred of James Potter or his guilt over the death of Lily but rather from the aftermath that he and Albus had laid witness to in what they thought were the peaceful suburbs.)

“Where’s your guardian?” This caused a change of expression on the boy’s face, an unwilling smile broke out on his lips, one that was a bit twisted as if Severus had unwittingly made a rather cruel joke.

“He’s out.” He said quickly and again the lips twitched as if he found his next thought to be particularly amusing, “Would you like to talk to him?”

Something about the way he said it, as if it was the last thing that any sane man should want to do, made Severus hesitate in his answer. Potter had been very young at the time, only seven, and Albus and Severus had been left wondering if Potter would be fully aware of the situation he was in at such a young age or if he would be kept ignorant of it. It seemed however that Potter was at least partially aware that some things were dangerous, more so than most eleven year olds, and that made Severus more than a little wary.

“Yes, I believe I would.”

“Okay then,” Harry said but made no move to reach for a telephone or an owl but instead sat where he was as if the words were enough to summon his guardian from the ether, “I’ll go get some tea while we wait.”

A few minutes later the boy returned with two beakers filled with tea and handed one to Severus before reclaiming his seat on one of the empty coffins. The boy didn’t seem to be one for chat, and Severus wasn’t sure whether he found that relieving or alarming, he hadn’t wanted to listen to Potter’s (Lily’s) son chatter but the strained silence where the boy’s eyes simply weighed him and quietly judged his worth was hardly better.

After what seemed like an eternity someone walked into the shop, his entrance announced by the ringing of a small bell on the door. His first thought was that the man was not a wizard or otherwise pretending to be a muggle, a wizard would typically apparate into the house or otherwise floo, no one simply walked through their own front door. Then he remembered some of the more mysterious jars lining the shop’s walls and again rethought that statement.

The man was certainly dressed like a muggle, wearing a black formal suit that clashed to alarming degrees both with his surroundings and Harry Potter’s more colorful outfit. However the man didn’t walk like the average muggle; there was something dangerous to his confident movements towards them. His hands were gloved which was odd considering the July heat outside the shop and yet it seemed as if he was very comfortable in them and lost no dexterity with the extra fabric on his skin. His hair was very dark, perhaps dark than Potter’s, and his eyes were an odd shade of brown that for a moment seemed almost to be the same red that the Dark Lord’s had been.

For a Death Eater’s disguise it would be too reminiscent of the Dark Lord for any of them to feel confident wearing that face. Albus and he, early on in their investigations, had crossed most of the Death Eaters as they were either in prison or too unstable to manage to keep the boy alive for a lengthy period of time, that cool confident smile and those eyes simply reaffirmed Severus’ suspicions that whoever this wizard or man was he had not worked for the dark lord.

“Entertaining guests, Harry, you know we’re only open on Sunday’s by appointment.” The man tsked slightly and ran a hand through the boy’s dark curls.

The boy’s expression towards the man was one that Severus couldn’t quite decipher, there was devotion there, admiration, but also wariness, and a hint of fear and bitterness. He looked at the man as if he had no idea what he was capable of or what he might choose to do next.

“He wanted to see you.” Harry said before adding, “He has a letter.”

“Oh, he wanted to see me?” The man asked as if somewhat surprised but delighted all in the same instant. It was the same brand of delight the Dark Lord had shown when being offered a mudblood who didn’t know his place.

Harry gave a small hm of acknowledgement, not quite a yes or a no, but rather something non-committal in between that allowed him to distance himself from Severus and whatever his fate might be.

The man turned towards Severus a more charming smile now plastered onto his face rather than the shark like one that had been there earlier, “So then, what may I do for you today?”

He then proceeded with a wary eye on the adult into the typical Hogwarts introductory spiel Minerva usually had the misfortune of giving out. The man, if he was pretending to be a muggle, didn’t even pretend to look shocked or surprised or even disbelieving of the existence of magic. It was as if he was deliberately leaving the decision up to Severus, muggle or wizard, and rubbing it in his face when Severus couldn’t make up his mind.

(Overlaid on top of the man’s expression Severus saw what had been left of the Dursleys when he and Albus arrived, the slow whirring of the ceiling fan and blood still dripping down the walls and from the ceiling in steady intervals. It must have been those eyes, it brought back too many memories of the Dark Lord.)

His attempts to gather information on the boy were similarly unsuccessful. It’d been after Severus had finished explaining the letter and had received a vague and distracted confirmation from the boy that he would be attending. They’d been left sitting there in silence, the man watching him expectantly as if waiting for some other bit of information to come and looking almost pleased that Severus was remaining silent, and the boy just staring at the letter as if he wasn’t quite sure what to make of it.

Severus wasn’t quite sure how to approach it because had it been any other child he would not have had prior information about the boy. If he asked what happened to the Dursleys and how the boy managed to end up at a shop called ‘The Undertaker’s” in London then he would also have to explain why Harry Potter was important enough to warrant such scrutiny. Severus was quite determined that if Harry Potter was ignorant of being the boy who lived then he was not going to be the one to inform him. It had taken quite the argument, and the mention of the life-debt left unpaid as well as Lily’s sacrifice and Severus’ involvement in the whole thing, to get him to come at all.

So he started vague, “Your parents went to Hogwarts.” He said trying to school his face so that it did not betray his nostalgia for his friendship with Lily or his bitter hatred of Potter. Harry didn’t seem to notice anything odd, he blinked a few times at Severus in surprise, but the man smirked as if everything was written all over Severus’ face. He checked his occlumency barriers and searched for the tell-tale probing of a legillimens but there was none to be found.

“Really?” The boy asked showing his first signs of real enthusiasm in the conversation, it made his whole face light up, so that he appeared to come alive in front of Severus. Suddenly he looked like a normal little boy and the juxtaposition was so great that Severus found himself thinking how unnaturally old the boy had seemed before.

“Yes, I knew them quite well. I knew Lily had a few relatives, the Dursleys, but forgive me I can’t seem to place your guardian.”

The boy paled a bit at the mention of the Dursleys, so he did know, but he did not move to speak about them or elaborate on Severus’ observation. No it was the man, with that too cheerful smile, who waved his hand and responded, “I’m afraid I’m a little more removed from the family tree than that.”

He didn’t offer his name or any other information leaving Severus in the dark with no polite way to steer the conversation forward. Too invasive and Harry Potter might choose not to attend Hogwarts at all and with the prophecy unfulfilled it was instrumental that Potter attend Hogwarts or so Albus had always said.

“It is a bit odd though, that you wound up with your more distant relative rather than the Dursleys, Petunia was your mother’s sister.” He observed instead.

Again Harry said nothing but appeared to be growing steadily grimmer as the conversation progressed, perhaps remembering whatever it was that had dismembered his relatives into shapes so unrecognizable it had taken truly advanced spells to reassure themselves that Harry Potter’s blood was not somewhere in that mess.

“He did live with them, for six years, but in the end they proved unfit for parenting.” The man responded, “But this is all rather intrusive for a first meeting, isn’t it professor Snape?”

And thus any efforts at gathering more information were efficiently cut by the man in black. Severus couldn’t help but feel he had been expertly played by a man who was a master at his craft. He’d thought about legillemency for a few moments, if the man was truly a muggle his secrets would be open for Severus to see, but that doubt about the man’s true nature stopped him.

In the end he told Albus that in spite of his rather eccentric muggle disguise that was accurate in some manners but not in others he felt strongly that the man was a dark wizard. He had little to go on for evidence, only that sinking feeling when being in the same room as him, and the constant reminders of the Dark Lord that had been there. The man had been charming, polite, and seemingly quite normal but he had an edge that he had not bothered to hide in front of Severus. The man, he told Albus, wants to be found out.

When Albus had asked if Harry Potter himself was dark, like the young Tom Riddle had been, he’d paused and tried to think back on the young boy and found that he couldn’t categorize him as dark or light merely odd and withdrawn. He’d given Albus a noncommittal answer of not being able to tell in such a short amount of time and said that they’d watch for signs of the dark arts when he arrived at school but with the memory of those cold green eyes that had seemed so flat he wondered if such a label as dark or light could really capture that expression.

In the end Harry Potter, in spite of being a prophesized child, had not held Severus’ attention it was that man and the parting gaze he had given Severus, “Catch me if you can.” Those red-brown eyes had seemed to say.

* * *

For a long time the demon didn’t have a name. He had explained to Harry, after taking human form and slaughtering his relatives like a mad butcher, that demons didn’t have names and that typically it was up to the human master to assign one. Standing in terror in the remains of his relatives trying not to break into hysterics or otherwise vomit he’d been far too distracted at the time to take in the words properly.

They left Number 4 Privet Drive fairly swiftly, the demon saying something about it being too soon for Harry to go catatonic, and left for a fancy hotel in downtown London. Harry had never seen anything so pretty, everything glittered or was otherwise colorful, the carpets were an old and distinguished red and looking up at the ceiling he could see every color imaginable in the tiny crystals hanging from the chandeliers.

He felt small and dirty and covered in blood and disease in that place.

In the room after Harry had been given a bath by the demon, which had made him jumpy because the Dursleys rarely ever touched him and never in a way that was a simple hand on the shoulder like the demon, the demon had sat him down on the bed to discuss Harry’s future.

Some day, not then, maybe not for a long time, the demon was going to eat his soul. They’d made a contract, there was no backing out, no escape from it, even if Harry tried killing himself first it would not work. Harry took all of this in, not understanding all of it, with large frightful eyes that couldn’t help but see what remained of his relatives.

“Your wish was… rather vague.” The demon said his eyes almost glowing in the half lit room, not red like Harry had expected but a reddish-purple with slitted pupils like a cat, “Normally I, or any other demon for that matter, wouldn’t have bothered with such a request but you have a rather interesting soul so I decided to make an exception.”

Harry then tried to remember what he wished for, in the cupboard hugging his knees and trying not to think of spiders, but it kept slipping away from him in the carnage that had been waiting outside.

“What this means is that we’ll deal with the issue of your soul and my payment when we see fit as there’s no set goal or time limit which you’ve set for yourself, there’s no need to discuss the finer details now, until then I am yours to command and you may have whatever you wish.”

Harry nodded, a small distracted nod, still thinking about everything that had happened and how it all seemed like a terrible dream even though the bed was so soft and the bath had been so warm. The Dursleys had always said he was a no good and stupid but at the end of the day he really was neither, even at seven he knew that whatever he wished did not include bringing the Dursleys back and returning to the cupboard like it never happened. As much as he wanted to say that, tears gathering at the corner of his eyes and the demon just looking at him and looking so human too, he knew that he just couldn’t ask for something like that.

Whatever you wish didn’t include most things Harry would have wished for; his parents alive, the Dursleys alive, for the Dursleys to like him, for kids at school to like him. Whatever you wish was expensive hotel rooms with warm baths and soft fluffy beds, and that was nice, but he wanted his parents more.

The demon had let Harry sob himself to sleep then, putting an arm around the boy’s shoulder and just holding him, in the only horrible affection Harry felt he had ever known and Harry had just sobbed until he couldn’t any more.

The next morning the demon had asked him what Harry wanted to name him. Pushing around the room service ordered breakfast of eggs with eyes that felt very tired in spite of the long sleep Harry thought about it, “You don’t really have a name though, right, so why do you want one?”

The demon had looked a bit stunned at that, not anything very visible, a slight widening of the eyes and a slackening of the facial expression like he’d never been asked that before and certainly hadn’t expected Harry to. The demon caught himself soon enough and he was giving Harry a slight smile, one Harry hadn’t seen yet, a more genuine happy smile than the others had been which had all had an edge to them, “Oh it’s not really for me, Harry, it’s for you and I suppose for other humans. If we go out in public I’m going to have to be called something.”

Harry guessed that was true but he didn’t give the demon a name right then, he had the feeling that the demon needed a good name, one that fit really well. He couldn’t be named something like Dudley or even Harry because it just didn’t fit at all. He needed a human name that wasn’t really human, or at least, that’s what the seven year old Harry Potter thought.

For the first few months they had moved around a lot, always in really fancy hotels that Harry had never dreamed of seeing, and they visited a lot of famous places in London and throughout England. The demon always had interesting things to say about things, apparently he’d spent a lot of time in England, he had always liked England he said, “The English have such a penchant for tragedy.”

He’d been lots of interesting places in England. He’d even been in the Tower of London before it became open to the public. They’d been looking at the building and the ravens outside that didn’t look too much different than the demon himself, “Victoria was having a slight disagreement with my master at the time and things escalated to the point where I had the pleasure of witnessing first hand England’s finest brands of torture. The rack was singularly unpleasant.”

Harry wasn’t sure how he felt about these statements, on the one hand they were interesting, and the demon always looked so happy and affectionate when he said these things. The Dursleys had never told Harry things like that or looked at him with a kind smile while holding his hand. On the other hand though whatever the demon had usually contained some sort of implied violence, usually not stated directly, and he said it as if it was supposed to be funny. That always unnerved Harry a little.

In some ways, Harry supposed, it was like having a real family. They would walk around London and women would come up to the demon and say he had the most darling looking son, much later Harry would realize that the women were more interested in the demon and what he could do in the bedroom than they were in cute little Harry but at the time it had always made Harry blush and smile and attempt to hide behind the demon. Harry hadn’t remembered ever being anyone’s son, the Dursleys had barely claimed him as family, only stating he was their nephew or Dudley’s cousin when it was absolutely necessary.

Still, he could never quite forget that the demon was a demon at the end of the day.

He had eyes like a cat sometimes, not all the time, but sometimes. Normally his eyes were a brown that was almost red if you looked too closely at them, the color of mahogany or fall leaves, and Harry always thought they were quite pretty. Sometimes though, and Harry didn’t know why, his eyes would get that purple red tint they’d had in the hotel room where they almost seemed to glow and his pupils shrank until they were only dark slivers in his eyes.

He always wore gloves too, or most of the time at least, sometimes when they were alone he’d take the gloves off and his fingernails would be black and on his left hand there was a star just like the one that was on Harry’s. The seal, he always called it with an almost affectionate smile, this is the bond that ties us together Harry Potter.

So Harry knew that even if it looked real in public that didn’t make it real all the time.

By the time his eighth birthday rolled around he told the demon that he wanted to stop living in hotels and settle down somewhere in London. He still liked seeing things and visiting museums but he also didn’t want to pretend to be something that he probably wasn’t.

“London, not the suburbs, not like where the Dursley’s lived. Okay?”

The demon had looked at him pensively, Harry didn’t give too many orders, it felt unnatural to do it. The Dursleys had always given him orders, making him do this and that while Dudley did nothing, and he always remembered the feeling of what it was like to be told to do things constantly before giving an order to the demon. He didn’t really want to be anyone’s master; he mostly just wanted to be Harry.

So the demon had thought about it for a bit and had taken them to somewhere much different, which was, in the end what Harry had wanted all along. So it was in August of 1988 that Harry and the still unnamed demon moved into the Undertaker’s shop in London and Harry’s view of the world became just a little bit broader than before.


	3. Chapter 3

The nice thing about the Undertaker’s was not that it was kinder or more pleasant than either Number 4 Privet Drive or the hotels they had stayed in but that it made no pretenses. It was worn, dirty, and put on no masks or false shows about itself.

It used to be a funeral parlor, back in the days when the Undertaker had actually been an undertaker and mortician. The times had changed though and he’d found that less people were willing to fall into an unmarked grave and people didn’t give too much thought to the gray haired, scar faced, man dressed in black rags who spoke in a cockney accent that reminded one of the lowest of backgrounds. Strangely enough, as London changed he managed to stay in the same field of business, just in a less reputable manner.

In the 1960’s he began work as a cleaner and he’d been one ever since.

When Harry had first met him as a shy and terrified eight year old boy, clinging to the arm though he knew it was about the worst place to cling just out of mere familiarity, he had pictured a man who cleans houses rather than the darker grimmer truth. The demon had not allowed this misconception to rest for long.

The demon had a policy though, towards his latest charge of Harry Potter, that he would be frank with him in ways he usually wasn’t with his masters. Perhaps this was simply because underneath it all Harry had a strong desire for honesty, with the Dursleys he had always wanted the charades to stop so they could just tell him to his face why they despised him, he’d never said it but it was always there burning none-the-less.

“Normally,” The demon had commented at one point, “I never reveal these sorts of things to my masters, it makes them uncomfortable to know how little they control, but you don’t mind the discomfort Harry. You despise hypocrisy without even knowing the word for it, only that it describes the pigs that were your relatives before they went to the slaughter house, and as your servant it’s my duty to anticipate your needs. So here we are, exploring the true nature of the world together. Tell me, Harry, is it all you hoped for?”

So after Harry had shaken those gloved, scarred hands, stared into those unseeing pale green eyes, and the man had left the room with a whistle and a jig in his step and they had been left alone the demon had leaned over to him and told him of corpses left in pieces in boxes on the river, of jugs of bleach and garbage bags, and latex gloves worn over hands.

It had just brought to mind the Dursleys and the thought of them always made him ill.

It still looked like a funeral parlor, at any rate, there were still coffins here and there strewn about the floor without any care for where they were placed. The tools of the Undertaker’s latest trade were stored in the basement, chain saws, bags, cleaning supplies, and bleach lined the walls down there and it always made Harry more than a little nervous to see them.

The Undertaker himself was eccentric, but Harry didn’t know that word at the time, at the time he just thought he was more than a little odd. When they had first walked in the door that summer’s day, a little bell tinkling and announcing their entrance, he had appeared out of nowhere in what looked like a tattered black cloak and a ripped top hat. Silver hair obscured his eyes and most of his face so that it looked as if he was walking about blind but even so he had a weird sort of grace to him, not like the demons perfect movements but more than human all the same, that allowed him to navigate through the piles of coffins and make his way to the pair.

“Hullo, hullo, you’ve got a new one then, eh butler?” The man grinned, a wild smile that Harry found strangely not human, like the demon’s cat eyes.

“Please refrain from calling me that, I am no longer anyone’s butler.”

It was an odd tone to hear from the demon, he never sounded annoyed or exasperated around Harry, but here he was and it almost made him sound human. Harry remembered turning to look at him almost in wonder, taking in the narrowed frustrated eyes, and wondering how he had never guessed that the demon could have such expressions.

Meanwhile the man rocked back on the scuffed heels of dark boots, hands in pockets and surveying the demon with a casual laziness that seemed absurd given the situation, “Not what the earl says and he does usually know his business quite well, always did even way back in the day.”

“Yes, well, I suppose that is the point of contention then. Having been closer to him than you or any other creature for that manner I can assure you that, quite often, Ciel has no idea what he’s talking about.”

There’d been something of a strained silence then, the invisible figure of Ciel hanging between them all, and then he was brushed aside as if he was only a memory and the stranger was speaking again.

“So what does bring you here then? I don’t see any bodies needing hacking or cutting, ‘sides I always figured you liked to do them yourself.”

“The young master professed an interest to set up permanent residence somewhere… different, this place came to mind.”

On the whole Harry found his first meeting with the Undertaker to be unnerving, all of it rushing above his head, he wouldn’t learn many of the details of that encounter until much later. At the time he only had the feeling that the Undertaker knew something, knew the demon was dangerous, which was more than anyone else ever had. There was history there, left mentioned, but mostly unspoken.

He grew to like the Undertaker though, he was a pleasant change from the demon in some ways, he was always smiling for one thing and he meant it to. It was a violent smile, one that spoke of enjoyment in his work, but it was real in ways that the demon’s smiles never quite managed to be. The demon was always there, like a shadow Harry thought sometimes, but then there would be times when he would mysteriously vanish leaving a bewildered and almost frightened Harry behind. He’d go and find the Undertaker in these times for company, to tell himself that he couldn’t miss the demon, and yet it never dulled the ache.

It was the Undertaker, and not the demon, that explained that he wasn’t human either. “You see, Harry, there’s a lot more of us not-human types than you think just walkin’ around the street all normal like. You see them and you think, oh he looks a bit odd he does, but usually not more than that. The thing is there’s lots of different types, not just demons like your friend the butler, but reapers and angels and a few other things too. I used to be a reaper, back in the day, retired though when I got myself too much of a reputation. Reputations are terrible for your hair, makes it go all frizzy I tell you, and opened up me own shop. Been here on the east end ever since.”

A reaper, he’d explained, was neutral when it came to the placement of human souls after death. “Not that heaven’s much heaven or hell’s much hell if you know what I mean. Lot of that stuff written down in that bible isn’t what you think it is.”

They didn’t determine where the soul would go but rather if it should go at all. They looked over all the events in a person’s life up to a certain point, and then judged and tried to decide if they still had something to contribute to the world, most of the time the answer was no.

“Course, sometimes it happens.” The man had looked pointedly at Harry then, at the scar on his forehead, and had grinned ominously.

Harry had something about him that made people, at least the non-human people, a bit more comfortable with themselves. Not that the Undertaker had ever made his reaper status much of a secret, people rarely asked, but he’d never outright told anyone either. “You’ve got a reaper’s eyes, I think, or almost they’re a little on the dark side but they’re there. You’ve got eyes like death, Mr. Potter.”

Somehow, even with those frightening words, Harry had taken that as the compliment it was meant to be.

Life in the shop had a sort of comfort that moving from hotel to hotel, playing the tourist, hadn’t. It was certainly more home than anywhere he’d been before and Harry liked that. Some afternoons lounging around the house he’d listen to the music the Undertaker played while he worked, “Don’t Fear the Reaper” was always a constant and Harry could pretend that it wasn’t playing to cover up some other noise instead. He didn’t like what was done in the basement, he didn’t like the garbage bags that’d be delivered late at night by men with dirty hands and narrowed eyes or the times that the Undertaker himself would walk out near midnight with a bounce in his step and a bottle of bleach in hand, but the Undertaker smiled at him and meant it and sometimes the demon would smile and mean it too.

* * *

He never did manage to make any human friends.

When fall came around he was enrolled back into school, as if nothing had happened, still Harry Potter now eight years old and entering his second year of primary. The school wasn’t like those in the suburbs, everyone had that edge of poverty given by the inner city, and they stared at Harry’s bright clothes with a critical eye but somehow even with that they gave him less trouble than Dudley ever had. They never sought him out, and that hurt for a while, but then at least they weren’t pointing fingers anymore either.

At first he’d wanted to ask the demon about it, about why he couldn’t ever seem to make friends, human friends but he had the feeling that these weren’t questions you asked him. He was always so far removed from being human, looking almost untouchable even when he was standing right next to someone, so Harry felt he could never bring up things like this not when there wasn’t a command to be given.

He went to the Undertaker instead. The Undertaker had thought about it for a while, leaning back on a coffin as if it was a sofa, and then with his trademark wild grin he’d said, “They must see the reaper in you, little Harry.”

“The reaper? Like you?” Harry had asked wondering how he would look like the Undertaker, sometimes when he looked in the mirror he’d see the blackbird instead, with dark hair like the demon’s and pale skin but never the Undertaker.

“It’s in the eyes, everyone knows green means death, even if they don’t think they know it. Everybody fears the reaper and they remember when they see one.”

Harry thought about this for a little while and hesitantly stated, “But I’m not a reaper, I’m human.”

“Well, they don’t know that, do they?”

So Harry looked a little too much like something everyone knew but couldn’t quite remember. He looked like he belonged with them, with the demons and the Undertakers and all those unnamed things that creeped along in the dark, he wasn’t sure how he felt about that.

He’d stare at himself in the mirror sometimes at night and wonder what manner of person was staring back. The Dursleys had always called him a freak after all and he had tried not to believe it even if sometimes _things_ happened but after this he was wondering if there wasn’t something to that after all.

One  night he and the demon had been sitting in the kitchen, a place that had taken much cleaning on their own end to make it a place where you could eat things without being poisoned, and he had asked the demon a question that had been bothering him but one he knew the demon would give him an honest answer to. “Am I human?”

The demon had looked at him curiously, eyebrows raised in that way they sometimes did, he’d straightened and looked Harry in the eye, “Completely.”

“How do you know though?” Harry asked his hands fidgeting thinking that his eyes might have been just a bit too green after all.

“I’m a demon, Harry, and at the end of things humans are our life blood as well as our work. What kind of a demon would I be if I couldn’t tell one from a reaper? You are, Harry, very human.”

And Harry had been relieved but even so, thinking on it later, he couldn’t help but wonder if there had been some things the demon had failed to mention. A very interesting soul, he’d always said about Harry, not good or bad but interesting.

Even an eight year old can wonder what interesting means at the end of the day.

* * *

Harry didn’t meet Ciel until a while after he had moved in, a little over a year, and it wouldn’t be until he met Ciel that he would give the demon a name. Ciel was a ghost in that house, rarely mentioned, but always there more or less.

All Harry knew about him, before he ever saw his face, was that Ciel had once made a contract with the demon but that something had gone wrong. The Undertaker and the demon for that matter had never specified what had happened specifically or given any other details but in some ways this made Ciel’s presence more tangible.

The Undertaker worked for Ciel, at least he was on Ciel’s payroll. Ciel ran London’s underworld as if it was a vaguely amusing child’s game, he also ran Tokyo’s, Hong Kong’s and New York’s. The Undertaker said it kept him busy enough to keep him from being bored enough to cause any real destruction. It was Ciel, the Undertaker had said, who had initially set the Undertaker up as a cleaner when Undertaking proved to be without profit in the funeral business.

It was clear they’d had history before that but on that the Undertaker kept his lips sealed and his teeth in a grin. “That’s for later, little Harry Potter.”

As for the demon, he didn’t divulge information on former clients, it wasn’t professional he’d said. His eyes had been cold when Harry had asked, sharper than usual, and Harry understood that there were places you didn’t touch.

He didn’t disappoint in person. When the young man with blue eyes walked through the door Harry had known it was him instantly, he had that inhuman look about him, that same air as the demon and the Undertaker only a little different something only he had. The way he stood and walked and looked at you commanded your attention and made it stay there. If the demon was smooth then this man was sharp, in a dark suit he seemed to have an edge that remained forever sharp, his eyes were always knives.

Harry and the demon had been sitting on one of the coffins, Harry doing homework and occasionally asking the demon for help. It was surprising how good the demon was at things like math and reading, but then the demon seemed to be good at everything, as if perfection was a necessity. At the sound of Ciel's entrance they had both looked up and the demon had stood, not without grace, but with a speed that was almost uncanny.

There was a hint of tension in the air, almost invisible to the eye, but there all the same.

One look at Harry, his eyes narrowed, and then flickered to the demon and he said, “I thought you didn’t like watching the same play twice, Sebastian.”

The demon smiled a sharp tense sickle of a smile like a reaper’s blade, Sebastian the other man had called him, he had once gone by Sebastian, “It’s hardly the same play, besides, I haven’t touched his soul. Scout’s honor, young master.”

Ciel’s thin black eyebrows raised, “You’re telling me you found him, like that?”

“Precisely, or rather he found me, you do remember the process.”

Harry wanted to ask what they were talking about but he’d learned that with the demon sometimes you didn’t want clarification. If it was about Harry, something wrong and interesting about Harry, then Harry didn’t want to know. The young man had said nothing then, a small hm, then he pushed past the pair of them with only the muttered words, “You’ve gone positively domestic, Sebastian, I’m beginning to think you enjoy this kind of thing.”

Later he’d talked to the Undertaker about it, “I don’t think he likes me.”

The Undertaker had scoffed, “The little earl doesn’t go around liking most people, wasn’t his style. Then again contracts with demons, it’s like cancer, you know one day it’s gonna kill you so it’s not exactly the time to go around making friends. He probably likes you fine, you just bring up some interesting thoughts.” That grin on the word interesting, as if interesting was a terrible thing that you couldn’t help but watch, like a train crash or the Dursleys dripping from the ceiling.

“You mean bad, when you say interesting you mean bad.” Harry commented hugging his knees closer to his chest.

The man cackled, “Oh, but Harry, nothing’s ever bad or good, only interesting. Only hilarious, that’s what makes life and death so very fun!”

Ciel never stayed long, usually just long enough to toss the Undertaker a couple bills, glare ominously at Sebastian, and chat a little over tea about the latest developments around the world. He’d never say or even acknowledge Harry, any comment about Harry was directed at the demon who he always called Sebastian, to him it was as if Harry had written himself out of existence by making the contract.

He didn’t know why he felt he needed to talk to Ciel, maybe it was simply that there were so few people to talk to, there was the Undertaker and there was the demon and that was the end of things and in the end he had reservations about both. Perhaps it was something else though, something he could place that drove him to the demon’s former client.

It might have been on the Ciel’s third or fourth visit, Harry couldn’t remember precisely, it was different in that it was the first time he had the opportunity to approach the man alone. The demon had probably sensed his need to talk to Ciel and given him the opportunity, as he had with the Undertaker, and the Undertaker was off somewhere working leaving Ciel sitting by himself on a coffin and Harry staring down at him from the stairs.

“Sebastian, you named him Sebastian, right?” Harry asked, Ciel’s head had turned sharply towards his and those dark blue eyes had narrowed dangerously.

For a moment Harry wondered if he would answer at all or simply leave, but eventually he said in that cool voice, “Yes, not after Saint Sebastian, although the idea of seeing him shot incessantly by arrows is quite amusing. I named him after my dog, I always did like that dog. You haven’t given him a name, have you?”

Harry creeped closer until he was sitting on the coffin next to Ciel, he didn’t look exactly welcoming but he didn’t move away or force Harry off either, “No, I… I can’t think of anything…”

“Did you have a dog?” Ciel asked drily.

“No.”

“Pity, we could have had a theme.”

They were silent for a few moments, sitting next to each other and staring into the dark, finally slowly Ciel said, “HAL, he’s an artificial intelligence in a very famous film, and believe me it does fit.”

The eight year old Harry Potter was already quite different from the seven year old, that house had changed him, and made him grow up just a little so that he would pause and stop and think. The seven hear old would never agree to a name like HAL but the eight year old knew that this was Ciel’s only overture of friendship and that it was best to take these things as they came. Names were only human things after all.

It was only after Harry agreed to name the demon HAL that Ciel tossed him a copy of 2001: Space Odyssey to watch, and he found staring into the red unblinking eye of HAL that he did agree. Somehow, even when it seemed it shouldn’t, the name did fit.

After that his relationship with Ciel had grown easier even if the demon, HAL now, seemed positively furious at his former client for coming up with it. It seemed the more unhappy the demon was the more Ciel smiled, until he was grinning almost as much as the Undertaker in those first few weeks after the demon had been renamed.

It was always strange, how normal things seemed even when no one was looking.


	4. Chapter 4

The first time Harry truly realized he wasn’t as human as everyone told him, as he was constantly assured, was during those years at the Undertaker’s after the Dursleys but before Hogwarts had even existed for him. The truth was that it had not presented itself for a while, in spite of the hidden things in the basement and the skeletons lurking in the closet he was more content than he had been in a long time.

At the age of ten Harry lacked the desperation that he’d had as a child. He had few friends and the few friends he did have all had that dangerous inhuman edge to them and eyes that almost seemed to glow but it was more than he’d had before. He had a sense of normalcy that he had always lacked and some days with HAL it seemed as if he really was just leading some eccentric bizarre life.

He went to school, his vision had worsened to the point that he needed glasses, he visited places in London with HAL, and occasionally he would talk with the Undertaker and Ciel whenever he came by to visit. It seemed almost as normal as things could be, considering.

Still, given the nature of the Undertaker’s work it was only a matter of time until a confrontation occurred. Normally the Undertaker was called purely for the scavenging so he was never targeted himself, he was just there for the cleanup. The Undertaker kept the cops off everyone’s back and all the gangs and mobs knew it too but every once in a while some punk would try to get back at the one man who didn’t seem to have enough associates to protect him.

To outsiders the Undertaker must have made a bizarre picture, a man constantly on some sort of high, who was so far gone that he found cutting up corpses into confetti to be cathartic. His connections to Ciel, the hellhound of the underworld, were not obvious to any human that came across him.

It’d been a quiet night, Harry drinking tea with HAL upstairs with the sounds of “Wouldn’t it Be Nice” drifting up from the basement. Sitting cross legged on a coffin and drinking out of a cracked bowl Harry hadn’t felt the need to make conversation and HAL, it seemed, didn’t either. It was one of those nights where you sat back and thought about how everything had happened and how strange life really was, because the seven year old Harry in a cupboard could never have imagined this, and he always wondered then where his life would curve next because the contract wasn’t over and the journey was headed somewhere.

They shot out the lock and forced their way in. In retrospect they weren’t too much older than Harry, ten years at the most, young men in baggy clothing with guns in their hands and tattoos covering their arms.

“Oi, where’s that bastard cleaner?!” They went for Harry first, the smartest thing really, if HAL had been human then using Harry as a hostage would have kept them alive. As it was though Harry found himself pressed against one of their chests with a gun to his head, sweat dripping down his face, and distantly he heard the crunch of his fallen glasses beneath someone’s feet.

“Well, isn’t this exciting?” HAL was more a blob then than a person in that moment, but Harry knew without having to see that his cat eyes were out and glowing that unnatural purple color.

“You tell us where the cleaner is and the brat keeps his brains!” The gun was nudged harder against Harry’s temple, the blob that was HAL made no move but rather sighed.

“You know Harry, if push comes to shove I will kill these white trash punks for you, but that being said it will be quite messy. If you wish for them to have clean painless deaths you’re going to have to make it an order.”

There was no impatience in that tone only a dry sort of amusement, as if this was all distantly funny, and there wasn’t a gun against Harry’s head and two men shouting at him over the cheerful and terrible sounds of “Wouldn’t it be Nice”.

_Wouldn’t it be nice if we were older_

_Then we wouldn’t have to wait so long_

Harry swallowed his mouth opening but no words coming out and all he could see was that black and white smudge that was HAL still sitting on the coffin staring at him in expectation. Well, Harry, it’s time to make some sort of decision isn’t it?

“You think we’re joking jackass?!” Harry was cutoff before he could even begin the hands clutching at him turning into claws that scratched at his skin, “You think we won’t blow his head off just because he’s some kid?”

_Wouldn’t it be nice to live together_

_In the kind of world where we belong_

“Please!” He’d said, the word choked out of him, just that one.

“Please what, Harry? You’ll have to be more specific.” HAL noted and Harry was sure that if he could see HAL, really see him in that moment instead of the blurs, then his eyes would be like the HAL in the film that uncaring red stare just taking everything in.

_I’m sorry Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that._

“You think this is funny?! You think it’s funny to cut up our friends like dogs?!” Harry heard a click too close to his head for comfort, beyond him he could see the other man headed out of the room towards where the music was in the basement and the blob that was HAL still wasn’t moving.

_You know it’s gonna make it that much better_

_When we can say goodnight and stay together_

“Please, HAL!” There were tears pouring down his cheeks then, and sobs wracking his chest, as the panic seemed to close in and the world grew dim and the music just kept on playing to the harmonizing sounds of furniture knocked here and there by that other man searching for the stairs to the basement.

Sometime in between when the trigger was pulled and the bullet tore through his flesh something happened, Harry felt it, it came from him and not from the demon. He’d felt it before, distantly, with the Dursleys and he remembered the name for it very well the ‘freaky business’. It had always been small then, finding himself on the roof after being chased by Dudley’s gang, talking to a small snake in the garden, but whatever this was it was much larger than that had ever been. Suddenly, the shouting, screaming and knocking over of furniture stopped and only the music from the basement remained.

No longer held by anything Harry stumbled forward, stepping on the glass of his broken glasses without seeming to realize it. He was shaking all over and his expression was wavering between relief and horror in constant intervals, he noted distantly that he was making odd clicking sounds as if halfway between laughter, screaming, and sobbing.

A warm thick liquid began to pool under his feet and the clicking noise in this throat grew louder. “I… I… I…”

The blob that remained, sitting on the coffin, straightened and grew more focused with the sound of approaching footsteps. Soon enough Harry found himself being pressed gently into HAL’s dark suit and unable to look at whatever had happened.

HAL cleaned it up without having to be ordered to after having carried Harry upstairs to the bathroom, washing his feet and picking out the glass that had found its way into his skin, and then placing him in his bed and telling him not to walk for the time being unless he wanted to reopen the wounds.

The next day it looked like nothing at all had happened the only difference was a brand new pair of glasses presented to Harry on the table by HAL to replace the pair that had been lost the night before.

“I don’t want to wear glasses.”

It was perhaps the first order he had truly been insistent about, staring blankly at HAL, as if somehow the glasses represented everything that was human and that he wasn’t. He wouldn’t learn until later that all reapers were horrifically near sighted.

He didn’t know what Sebastian had done to his eyes to fix them, there had been a dark buzzing, a stabbing sensation, but then when he opened them he could see HAL clearly in front of him smiling tenderly at him.

“Are you sure… are you really sure that I’m human?” He asked and the demon had just continued smiling at him and brushed some of the wayward curls away from Harry’s face, “Of course, Harry, what kind of a demon would I be if I couldn’t tell a human from a reaper?”

* * *

Harry didn’t start experimenting until a little while after that, for the first few weeks it had been like the Dursleys to a lesser degree, everything had seemed distant and somehow unreal. School in particular had seemed odd, as if he didn’t belong there, and he had begun to suspect that he didn’t.

Little by little though he reached within himself until he found that place where things happened. At first it was tipping over cans, floating rocks, lighting things on fire, all small things really but they weren’t taxing or really all that difficult. Pretty soon he was doing it consistently, summoning objects when needed in the house and even more complicated things like teleportation.

HAL didn’t say anything about it, he didn’t seem particularly surprised, but the first time Harry teleported back to the Undertaker’s his eyebrows did lift as if caught slightly off guard. As usual it was the Undertaker who made things clearer.

They were sitting in the basement, Harry having recently overcome his fear of the place, after all it wasn’t as if the upstairs funeral parlor had any fonder or less bloody memories than the place filled with bleach.

“Suppose he never told you, demons don’t consider it all that important, humans are human to them no matter if they’re tall or fat or woman or anything else. Very unprejudiced demons are, at the end of the day. Really puts things in perspective, don’t you think Harry? Some humans can use magic, not like reapers or demons or angels of course, but they can use enough to have some pretty flashy parlor tricks. Some can be real pests to the reapers, if they decide it’s not their time to go, they make all these flashy little trinkets and then you have to go and smash them all up so you can take care of them proper.” He shrugged then as if it was no longer his business to hunt down the pesky humans who tried to save themselves from death.

“So then, I can use magic.” Harry supplied for the Undertaker.

“Bingo, the kid gets a cookie.” The Undertaker grinned over at Harry who couldn’t help but smile slightly back, “Still, most times I hear it isn’t that powerful, not for the little wizards at least. They have to get pretty big before they can do things like that, and even then most can’t.”

Harry didn’t comment on that, not wanting to ask if he would be a freak among these other humans as well, but he had been satisfied to know that he at least was partly human even if he sometimes doubted it. Time would tell, he supposed, if he was still more reaper-like than these other magic humans were.

By the time Ciel next visited Harry’s magical abilities had lost their novelty for everyone involved, floating books and tea sets were a worn sight and didn’t cause anyone to pause or falter in their tasks, and it was only with Ciel’s dubious blue stare that Harry once again realized how bizarre it all was.

“I leave for a few months and the inanimate objects start floating.” Ciel stated rather flatly after he had entered the shop.

Harry had let things unceremoniously drop, the books, the kettle, until a puddle of tea was forming on the floor beneath Ciel’s shoes.

“Is it such a bad thing, young master?” HAL noted with that exasperated tone he often used in Ciel’s presence, there was fondness there, but also exhaustion as if the mere sight of Ciel made him tired.

Ciel didn’t ask about it, whether it was HAL, the Undertaker, or even Harry who was making these things happen. Rather he stalked forward and found the Undertaker and talked business of who would need to be cleaned up soon, who was owed what, and various other things. Ciel didn’t dig into people’s pasts, Harry had discovered, it wasn’t in his nature.

He was a very focused person, always thinking on the now and the future, and his general thoughts on the past amounted to, “It happened therefore it’s irrelevant.”

Harry had learned very little about Ciel over the years as the Undertaker thought it would be better if Harry asked Ciel or HAL directly and neither of them seemed inclined to rehash old history.

He knew that Ciel wasn’t really in his young twenties like he appeared, that was due to something called a glamour, the true physical Ciel was thirteen and had eyes like HAL’s; glowing cat eyes. He knew that Ciel was almost considered a demon, but not quite, something stopped him from really taking that label.

When they’d watched 2001: A Space Odyssey after naming HAL Ciel had commented that he was more like HAL or any other android than a real demon.

Ciel spent more time in the human world than anywhere else, he rarely visited hell, and when he did it was only for very brief periods of time.

When Ciel first came back from talking with the Undertaker, looking at Harry with an intense gleam in his eyes that made Harry want to shrink behind a coffin, Harry first learned that he was technically only subletting HAL from Ciel.

“I didn’t think wizards made contracts with demons.” Ciel noted to HAL drily his eyes never wavering from Harry.

“Typically they don’t, wizards are very self-assured and often lack the true desperation needed to call upon our services, besides they usually think they can solve the problem themselves.”

Ciel said nothing, merely continued to stare down at Harry, his frown deepening, “When he gets older talents like that might be useful.”

There was a tenseness in the room then, HAL’s smile lost a little of its normal false cheerfulness and his red brown eyes narrowed at Ciel, “Careful, young master, my contracts are hardly your business.”

“I own you, everything of yours is my business, or did you forget our bargain?” Ciel asked his eyes losing their blue color and becoming that demon’s purple, except only one of his eyes looked normal, the other had a star inscribed over it the same star that was etched in Harry’s left hand.

“I suppose he hasn’t told you, Harry, Sebastian here is technically still in contract with me.” Ciel said his eyes flicking over to HAL and then back, “He can make contracts with humans like you because I allow it and the butler game got old very quickly. However, if I’m in need of his, or even your services for that matter, there’s nothing he can do to stop me.”

He didn’t mention what he might need either HAL or Harry’s talents for but it seemed that wasn’t the point. It was the first time Ciel showed interest in making his presence known in the magical world, Harry just hadn’t realized it at the time.

After the door had slammed up and Harry had returned to his sitting position on the coffin all he could notice was the anger that still clung to HAL’s figure, that tightness and narrowed eyes, that seemed to see through the building and watch Ciel so casually saunter away from them as if there was no danger in the world.

Back then though, Harry’s magic was more of an idea than anything else, hardly anything worth thinking over.

* * *

The eleven year old Harry Potter watched Severus Snape’s retreating figure as the man made his way back towards central London and wherever it was that the wizards gathered away from unseeing ‘muggle’ eyes. Harry still held the letter in his hand, but he did not look down on it, instead he thought of his parents.

He rarely thought about them, they had been so distant from him, too related to the Dursleys to think about without pain but then to find that they were more like him. He wasn’t sure how he felt about that.

He knew that with this Hogwarts he had been given the opportunity to dig into that unknown past.

“Do you think I should go?” Harry asked HAL who materialized in the doorway at the sound of the question.

“Well, I’d say that’s up to you Harry, he didn’t seem to doubt your willingness to go to the school. As far as wizards are concerned it’s the best magical school in the United Kingdom. Besides, one does not ask the opinion of their servants.”

Harry made a noncommittal noise at that, “He didn’t seem to like me too much either though.”

“Must everyone you meet like you, Harry? If you’re this desperate for approval then I’m afraid you’ll never be happy.”

There was something highly ironic about those words, coming from a demon, as if his happiness could somehow be assured when HAL was one day going to eat his soul.

“No, they don’t have to; still he could have been a little bit more excited. He doesn’t know anything about me.” Harry said with a sigh bringing the letter up to his face and looking at that elegantly written name again, Harry James Potter.

HAL didn’t say anything but by then Harry already knew his decision, it was time to move forward, he couldn’t stay at the Undertaker’s forever after all, “I’ll go.”


	5. Chapter 5

In an empty compartment, in brightly colored clothing that clashed almost painfully, Harry Potter stared across at a demon in the guise of a boy and wondered how no one could notice the difference.

Originally, after Professor Snape’s hasty departure from the store front, he hadn’t given much thought to attending Hogwarts other than that he would. He’d found that things worked out and the details fell into place whether he wanted them to or not; it was part of what it meant to be contracted to a demon. In telling HAL that he wanted to attend Hogwarts it was as if it was already written, it would happen, there was nothing more to it.

He suspected that HAL had intended to accompany him in some manner or another, HAL didn’t have to be in Harry’s presence, but rather it seemed that he preferred to as if to provide a continual reminder to Harry of the bargain they had made and the price that he would be owed at the end of it.

However, Ciel had been in London during that month of August, and he had put a stop to those plans with a single command.

“Sebastian will stay here.” They had been in the kitchen, the three of them, two demons and the undertaker lurking unseen in the basement staying safely out of the way of these demonic politics as he sometimes called them.

HAL had frozen over his tea, his eyes flicking to Ciel’s, glowing that demon’s purple he said nothing, did not even breathe and Harry carefully looked between the pair of them. He was not at the center of this argument, he knew it, this argument was centuries old between them and had never fully been resolved. Harry was simply the latest development.

“That is an order, Sebastian.”

“Of course, young master.” The words were said only in acknowledgement, there was no inflection in them, all that carefully crafted human emotion that HAL normally placed into his art had been cut out.

“I’ll go with you instead, it would hardly do for Sebastian’s reputation to leave you unprotected, and I suspect if I want to play with these wizards it would be much easier if I had an in.” He said drinking his tea and breaking the tension even with the weight of HAL’s eyes on him. HAL’s eyes dulled back into their usual mahogany tone, he looked at Harry then, and his expression seemed almost fatigued.

“It appears I cannot attend this school with you, however, should you call I will come no matter the distance no matter the barriers set against me.” HAL said before his cheerful, false, smile decorated his lips, “After all, space, time, and distance are little to beings like me.”

“Oh shut up, he’s eleven it’s doubtful people will be attempting to stab him to death.” Ciel barked looking somewhat annoyed by the display, perhaps even unnerved, and Harry couldn’t help but wonder if it was a familiar scene from his own human days as HAL’s master.

HAL gave him an odd assessing look, as if he knew something that Ciel didn’t but wasn’t quite willing to share, “I wouldn’t state things so confidently, you’ve been wrong before, after all.”

(Strange, he’d think later in Diagon Alley, that neither Snape nor HAL had let a hint of his past as the boy who lived through their lips. As if keeping it a secret was more significant than either of them were willing to say.

However sitting at the kitchen table with a letter and a list of supplies he didn’t know the truth of Harry Potter then.)

“You’ll come if I need you.” Harry interrupted before the conversation could travel too far from him, to a place where he couldn’t follow, “You always do.”

And so it was Harry and an impossibly young Ciel under the name of Ciel Phantomhive found themselves on the train to Hogwarts.

“I have little experience with wizards,” Ciel was admitting, his voice still sharp even when so very young, “I had no business with them until now and being outside of my realm of expertise I had no overwhelming wish to make them my business. Still, I expected something more impressive than a train from them.”

Harry just shrugged, he’d been wondering too, but he had the decency not to say it out loud or so disparaging as Ciel did. Ciel, Harry had found over the years, had little respect for anything. He had at one time had great respect for the government, for the queen in particular, but that had not so much faded as been ripped from him and now there was nothing left except perhaps HAL when he was in the mood. Ciel was a very bitter person.

Harry for his own part clutched at the wand that he’d been required to buy, a twin of the one that had apparently murdered his parents as well as many others, and had failed to kill him. It was more than a little alarming, learning that your entire existence was a lie, and that even the hope that you were somehow normal was little more than an empty dream. Of course he’d had the recurring nightmare that he wasn’t human, wasn’t close to being human, for years now and his status as the savior of magical Britain didn’t do anything to dissuade those fears it only further reinforced them. He now told himself, whenever he started to doubt, that someone like HAL wouldn’t be interested in a soul that wasn’t human, HAL’s interest was his only reassurance.

Even among the wizards he was an anomaly with eyes like the reaper.

Ciel regarded him quietly with arms crossed, dissecting him to find his use, and apparently he found enough to be satisfied. Ciel had tolerated him before but with his status as the Boy Who Lived Ciel had seen his purpose and how he might be used, a friend of the Boy Who Lived could go very far, and that was why Ciel had chosen Harry to come with rather than anyone else. It was an offer he couldn’t refuse, was what he’d said in the Undertaker’s.

Harry didn’t know how he felt about that, it seemed his most profound relationships were built on use. HAL raised him and gave him a home because one day he would devour his soul, the Undertaker grinned at him and told him secrets because he thought it was funny, Ciel associated with him because he thought it would allow him to gain something he hadn’t had before. The real people in Harry’s life, the demons and the monsters, always wanted something out of him and he’d come to accept that. It still stung though.

“Will they know you aren’t human?” Harry asked instead to which Ciel snorted.

“Hardly, humans aren’t that intelligent I’m afraid. Besides demons are perfectly capable of magic, better at it than humans certainly, and with a human smile on my face and a useless stick in my hand they won’t look close enough to see the real differences.”

People had always found Harry unnerving though, the Dursleys, children at school, even professor Snape had seemed uncomfortable around him. So maybe even if they didn’t say it, even if they didn’t think it, they still knew what was human and what wasn’t. Ciel didn’t like to be told he was wrong though, everyone agreed on that, so Harry kept his mouth firmly shut.

Instead he turned his head to stare at the English country side whizzing past quickly making their way towards Scotland where Hogwarts waited. Staring at the green and his own reflection he couldn’t help but think how sad it was that he couldn’t even get his hopes up for friends, it was as if he had already accepted that he would be a pariah once again, Harry Potter belonged with the demons.

“Great things.” He whispered to himself, repeating Ollivander’s words, and wondered what horrible thing that was supposed to mean from a man who did a very good impersonation of the Undertaker.

He felt as if some significant moment was happening, more noticeably than that day he had first met HAL beneath the stairs and made a wish, as if being on a train to Hogwarts was supposed to change things forever. He just felt tired though, terribly tired, and when he looked into the glass of the window he didn’t see his own eyes but the Undertaker’s staring back at him.

He hoped, distantly and vaguely, that he somehow managed to live up to these wizard’s expectations of him. It would be nice to be a savior instead of a reaper.

* * *

By the end of the train ride Harry had met five of his peers and Ciel had managed to alienate all of them before five minutes had passed.

First had been a lanky looking boy with red hair and clothes that were similar quality to those that the Dursleys had always given him. He had shuffled in, asking if there was a place to sit, and then took a seat next to Harry after taking a good look at Ciel and his usual unwelcoming expression.

After the introductions, Ciel Phantomhive and Harry Potter, the boy’s eyes had gone wide, “Cor, are you really Harry Potter?”

“Well, that’s a bit of an existential conundrum, isn’t it Ron Weasley?” Ciel had interrupted before Harry could respond, his eyes flashing a bit, “Certainly people have told him that he is Harry Potter, he believes he is Harry Potter, but does he truly know it?”

“Um, yeah, I’m Harry Potter.” Harry had said with a tight smile, he didn’t like that look in the boy’s eyes, as if he wasn’t a real person but was instead some sort of idea. It was worse than seeing HAL look at him and know that he was thinking only about the soul.

“Can I.. do you… the scar I mean?” Ron spluttered out to which Harry blinked slightly, it was the first time anyone had asked to see that scar, he had always known about it and wondered how it had gotten there but no one had ever thought it was important. It was the seal, hidden behind a fingerless glove on his left hand, that was far more meaningful than the scar on his forehead no matter what had left it behind.

He raised his bangs revealing the lightning bolt before dropping them, across the aisle Ciel gave a cold but amused smile, as if he found the situation distantly amusing if somewhat stupid.

“Wicked,” He breathed, stars in his eyes, and then he continued, “Do you remember any of it?”

“If he did would you really want to hear all the gory details of the massacre of his family?”

Ron’s eyes flicked to Ciel’s and he paled slightly, as if not realizing the implication of his question, it was funny though because the death of his parents had been bloodless. It had been a word, according to the books, just a word and green light wheras the Dursleys which he did remember had been so much more graphic. The Dark Lord, He Who Must Not Be Named, was not nearly so ruthless and terrifying as HAL had once been and for that Harry felt a kind of emptiness, as if a dark lord should have managed to be on par with a demon.

At the sight of that cold smile Ron had apologized slightly and stated something about going to find his brothers, taking his things with him as he went, and leaving Ciel and Harry behind.

“You didn’t have to do that.” Harry commented, although he doubted Ciel had done it for his sake, he got the feeling that Ciel was one of those people who liked to see others twitch when in uncomfortable situations. He couldn’t do it with the Undertaker, he was far too unflappable, but he certainly did it with HAL. Sometimes he thought this messing with the wizards business, accompanying Harry and leaving HAL behind, was all just a ploy to frustrate the demon.

“Of course not, I don’t have to do anything, I thought it was funny.” He clarified, and again there was that cold smirk similar to the demon’s but just a tad sharper, but there was no real amusment or laughter in his expression.

The next had been a bookish girl by the name of Hermione Granger and she had been followed by a very rich looking boy who, if he had been a little more dangerous and a little less arrogant, would have reminded Harry of Ciel who had left after realizing that Harry Potter was keeping company with something he called mudbloods, referencing Ciel.

“He knows you’re a demon then?” Harry had asked when the blonde and his two stooges had left.

“Don’t be ridiculous, it’s a racial slur, he thinks I don’t have wizarding parents. He happens to be correct, I didn’t, but he’s missing the point.” Ciel shrugged stiffly, as if to conform more to his role of an eleven year old, and said nothing else simply staring out the window.

Harry didn’t know if he’d have friends if he’d sat by himself, maybe blinded by the Boy Who Lived, by that terrible reputation he could have persuaded some of them to stay near him but as it was Ciel’s sharp tongue and demonic aura had been more than enough to send each and every one of them packing. It made the whole networking and making connections speech he’d given HAL seem a little bit pointless.

“Where do you think you’ll be sorted?” Harry asked instead, for Ciel it seemed like Slytherin was the way to go, even if it had people like Draco Malfoy in it Ciel would most likely be more Slytherin than all of them. Ambitious, cunning, and terribly clever they were all attributes that Ciel had in spades.

“I don’t really care, so long as I’m put somewhere with people in it.” Ciel said but the sharp way he said it made Harry think that he knew he was going to be put in Slytherin too.

“I don’t know where they’re going to put me.” Harry said, he didn’t feel brave, wise, loyal, or even all that ambitious. He felt like nothing, like he didn’t belong in these categories, and that somehow they’d know that.

“Somewhere with people in it, no doubt.” Ciel said with a sigh, perhaps wondering why Harry was bothering looking to a demon for comfort, it was funny and a little bit sad but demons were all he had for comfort.

“I guess, I’ll have to find out later then.” Harry said outloud but in his head he was thinking that he hoped it was Gryffindor, he wanted to be brave, to be noble, to be the ideal of society. He wanted to be the hero they all thought he was, even if they looked at him funny like he wasn’t a real person, it was better than being an almost reaper.

He didn’t know if that was the case though, thinking of himself stepping out of the cupboard and into the massacre he didn’t know if there was any attribute inside himself worth sorting, only the horror the terrible dull horror at seeing the work of a demon.

* * *

Just before he had left for Hogwarts, at King’s Cross Station, HAL had taken him aside from Ciel and even the Undertaker who had decided to show up. He wondered what they looked like, these young odd and somewhat dangerous looking men with a small boy; to an outsider they might have looked like a sitcom or else an eccentric version of a family.

HAL had kneeled down so that his mahogany eyes were staring directly into Harry’s, “If you need me, if your life is at risk, you need not even call and I will come. Just wish, think, and I will be there regardless of one contract or another. Being in contract with Ciel does not deny me my contract to you, he has enough power to keep me from Hogwarts temporarily, but not if you should wish for my presence stronger than he should deny it.”

Harry had stared back at him, not sure what to feel, only thinking that there were these moments every once in a while where HAL really was like a father to him and more family than the Dursleys or his dead parents had ever been. It was like life without HAL had never existed, “Thank you.”

Thinking about that moment later, when off on his own with a sullenly silent Ciel across from him, he hoped that moment wouldn’t come for surely if he needed to call the demon then disaster and death would follow.

Should he call, use the seal on his hand, then the walls of Hogwarts would surely be painted in blood.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A great thank you to jaderoller on tumblr, for prompting to bring this story back from the dead for a chapter.

So, the boy did show up.

 

Of course, if he hadn’t there would have been panic at a national level, not to mention Severus would have been sent out into London once again to retrieve him, but still some part of Severus had wondered if the boy wouldn’t simply disappear.

 

Perhaps, even, he’d been hoping for it.

 

Arriving on July 31st, he’d given them plenty of time, a month even to leave the country were they so inclined. However, neither the strange man nor the boy himself had given any indication of declining Potter’s Hogwarts admission. More, here he was on the first of September, hidden among the herd of eleven-year-olds all waiting in line for their sorting.

 

Potter, James Potter, had been grinning like an ass during Severus’ sorting. He remembered it clearly, even before he’d known the hell James Potter and Sirius Black would inflict on his life he’d somehow known to mark that face and engrave it into his mind. This boy, he’d thought to himself, would do his best to destroy everything. And he had, not without help from Severus when he’d alienated Lily, but Potter truly had taken all that was worth living for in Severus’ life and ground it into pieces.

 

The boy wasn’t grinning, didn’t buzz with excitement the way Lily had either, instead he seemed very quiet and almost diminished among his peers. If Severus hadn’t been looking for him, if he wasn’t Harry Potter, then Severus wouldn’t be surprised if the boy would melt into the floorboards and disappear from sight. Small, dark haired, and pale he seemed to deflect attention away from himself even as the students chattered among themselves wondering where Harry Potter was.

 

Severus had wondered if he’d been imagining how odd, how unnerving, the boy had been. Apparently, he hadn’t been.

 

Severus couldn’t put his finger on exactly what it was, the boy looked ordinary and unassuming enough (insultingly so, in fact), but there was something about him that Severus simply couldn’t stand. Not because he was Potter, Potter’s son, either, but something intrinsic to the boy himself that hadn’t been inherited from either of his parents.

 

Scoffing he forced himself to look away from Potter, soon to undoubtedly prove himself the spawn of the Devil, and roved his eyes over the other incoming students. Red hair, tattered robes, another Weasley and likely just as insufferable as the rest of them. Though, Severus supposed he was being unfair, he had never had any true issues with the older graduated pair, nor Percy Weasley for that matter, but after the twins he was inclined to hope any remaining Weasleys met some unfortunate accident before entering his school.

 

At any rate, he’d probably be under the hat two seconds and wind up in Gryffindor with the rest of his ilk.

 

Then, a few seats back flanked by Crabbe and Goyle was Draco Malfoy, Severus’ godson. Severus’ eye lingered on the boy, on his self-assured smirk and the way he attempted to casually glance about the room for Harry Potter. Now, Severus didn’t dislike his godson, not on principle, but he would be one of the first to admit that Narcissa and Lucius had done their son no favors and that in his own way he’d be hell to have in class. The trouble was, unless the upset of the century happened, the boy would be in Slytherin. Not to mention that Lucius would kill him if he didn’t award the boy more points than he was worth.

 

Still, by the expression on Draco’s face Severus was about to lose every shred of dignity he had left.

 

Mostly familiar faces, a few muggleborns thrown in for good measure, the Potter boy…

 

He stopped, blinked, and looked at a face he did not recognize. If Severus had not known better he’d have marked the boy as a pureblood, he had that aristocratic air about him, the pale skin and piercing eyes that one only saw in very old and very wealthy families. That innate sense of power, wealth, and authority wielded with a pride stretching back generations. However, Severus was well acquainted with any pureblood family that could hold themselves like that, and the boy did not share any of their features.

 

He was as small as the Potter boy, dark haired as well, yet this one did not blend in. The way he held himself, that confidence, drew every eye to him as well as the smirk on his pale lips as if he had seen all of this before and was hardly impressed.

 

His eyes, a dark and brilliant blue, met Severus’ and his lips twisted even more into a smile, as if he’d just seen everything Severus was thinking and found it terribly droll. If, that was, he didn’t find it quickly just as dull.

 

Muggleborn, rich muggleborn, sitting right next to Potter and perfectly comfortable as if they knew each other, and by the look on his face all but destined for Severus’ house.

 

Minerva called the boy to the stand, unnoticed with the murmur growing among students that Potter, Harry would be soon on that list, “Phantomhive, Ciel!”

 

The boy walked with a cool grace and pride that was all too reminiscent of the dark lord, of the way Voldemort had once walked among his followers.

 

And sure enough, as soon as the blasted thing was on his head it was calling out, “SLYTHERIN!”

 

Damn it all.

 

* * *

 

Harry knew right away that Ciel wasn’t supposed to have gotten sorted into Slytherin. You could tell by the snickering, by the murmuring and gossip, much the way Harry had always been snickered at in school with Dudley.

 

Ciel didn’t seem surprised, seemed instead a little amused by it all, like he had expected it all along and was glad everyone was living up to his expectations. He walked, as if nothing at all had happened, to an empty seat at the Slytherin table where they openly sneered at him.

 

What was it Ciel had said? Something about not having magical parents…

 

Harry didn’t really know, he hadn’t paid much attention, he never paid much attention. He’d always seemed so removed from everything, after HAL had shown up in his cupboard, like it was all in some other distant world that had nothing to do with him.

 

Harry’s was a world of Undertakers and demons, even wizards and witches somehow seemed too… Not mundane, not really, but earthly, human.

 

Walking through Diagon Alley with all the flashing lights and colors, purchasing books and robes, it would have amazed him once and it still did but… But he’d just had this nagging suspicion, even before he’d opened a book and saw his name inside, that it wasn’t his. Or, if it was his, then it was only for the moment.

 

And then when he’d gotten off the train they’d all been talking. One busy haired girl had gone on and on and on about the castle, the different houses, the courses they were going to take, even Harry Potter for that matter.

 

Others had talked less but been no less awed or excited as they’d been rowed across the lake towards the castle.

 

And Harry…

 

Harry had been struck then thinking that it just didn’t seem real to him, the future had never felt real to him. He could never picture himself as an adult, in one job or another, never even as a teenager for that matter in a secondary school. It’d been hard enough to picture one year following the next.

 

Somehow, he felt that he’d always be there in London with the Undertaker, HAL, and more and more often Ciel. That he and everything else would always remain the same. Yet, now everything was different again, just like it had once been different when he left the Dursleys.

 

Well, not quite, HAL wasn’t here this time.

 

“Potter, Harry!”

 

Potter lifted his head, eyes wide, realizing that he’d lost track of where he was and that Ciel had long since sat at his table. It was Harry’s turn under the hat.

 

The whispering turned into a dull anticipatory roar.

 

“Did she say Harry Potter?”

 

“Oh, I knew he was in our year!”

 

“What do you think he looks like, they say he looks like his father, like a Potter I mean.”

 

Harry felt himself shrinking into his seat, sweat beading on his forehead and dripping down his temples, if he had still worn glasses they would have been slipping from his face. Why were they looking for him? No, he knew why they were looking for him, that book he had bothered to read. But no one had ever truly looked for Harry Potter before.

 

No one human, at any rate, only a demon in a cupboard and his attention was something that even now Harry wasn’t entirely sure he should want. For all that HAL was kind to him, was perhaps the only thing in this world that was truly kind to him, he was still…

 

Harry, with a start, jerked to his feet and desperately tried to ignore the eyes and the whispers. No sneers yet, not yet, not with him having… Having done something beyond comprehension to that dark lord. But it’d come, he’d learned that much, the derision would always come even without Dudley Dursley.

 

It felt like miles, walking to that stool, the floating candles seemed to dim and the air grew dense and hard to breathe. The hat seemed to grow larger and larger, its mouth wider and twisting into a leering and anticipatory grin.

 

What would it see?

 

What had it seen in Ciel Phantomhive, Slytherin apparently, but what besides that? Did it know he wasn’t human? Would it tell someone, and if it did what would happen then? The school seemed to allow toads, cats, and all sorts of things but Harry very much doubted demons were accepted in these walls.

 

And what would it say about Harry Potter? What was the measure of Harry Potter’s soul, that same soul that had once enticed a demon…

 

With trembling fingers he lifted it off the stool, sat down, and placed it over his head, far enough down that it covered his eyes. It wasn’t brown, like Harry had been expecting with light filtering through the fabric but pitch black as if Harry had gone blind.

 

Even the cupboard, he thought, had been brighter than this.

 

“Difficult, very difficult…”

 

The voice was gravelly, spoken loudly as if right next to his ear, and yet at the same time it did not sound like a voice spoken out loud at all. It was like… In a way it had been like speaking to HAL the first time, when he’d been a raven in Harry’s cupboard, his beak had never opened but his voice had sounded all the same.

 

“Do you wish to make a contract?” HAL had asked, Harry hadn’t even really understood what that meant at the time.

 

“You’ve led a very interesting life, Mr. Potter,” the hat whispered said of his ear, “More difficult, I think, than many who have sat under my brim.”

 

Harry resisted the urge to squirm, to disappear into the floor and somehow find himself back in London when he’d been only Harry and not Harry Potter.

 

The hat seemed to catch this thought as it mused, “Hufflepuff thinking, that, and hard working as well. Your loyalty isn’t… absolute, I would say, but given your circumstances it’s stronger than it has any true right to be.”

 

Harry had the sense of something shifting, of the hat musing and moving to the other side of his head to whisper in his other ear, “However, you’re also a very careful boy, brave in a sense, but terribly careful. You know the consequences of your actions, of the actions of those around you, and that appearances can be deceiving. Slytherin, Mr. Potter, seems to have stained your very soul.”

 

Harry couldn’t see it through the hat but he had the distinct image in his mind of that pale blonde from the train, of Ciel, and the thought that the hat couldn’t possibly think Harry was like them. Harry was nothing like them.

 

“There are shades of Slytherin, Mr. Potter. Though they seem to have forgotten that as much as you have.”

 

If Harry went to Slytherin it would put Harry under Ciel’s power, Harry realized. Not that he wasn’t under Ciel’s power already, more so than most given HAL’s odd relationship with Ciel. Suddenly though, the thought was that much clearer that Harry would be in his dormitory, might even be sleeping in the same room.

 

And he…

 

He didn’t necessarily dislike Ciel, but there was something about him that made Harry believe that he would sacrifice any pawn, any piece, so long as it suited his needs. And, Harry wasn’t even really a piece that Ciel cared for.

 

“And if that’s not Slytherin, then I don’t know what is.”

 

Perhaps it was best, Harry thought grimly now that the hat seemed certain, after all Harry wasn’t allowed any kind of illusions. Best to submit himself now and get it over with, recognize exactly the world he stood in and his place in it, hadn’t he asked as much from HAL?

 

Why pretend to be something, to be somewhere, he wasn’t?

 

“Yes, it had better be SLYTHERIN!”

 

Harry stood, took off the hat, while his audience merely gasped in stunned silence.

 

* * *

 

The rest of the meal was quiet, the rest of the night quieter, many tried to talk to Harry (a good many were sneering now) but it all seemed so very far away to him. Like Harry was underwater and someone out there was calling his name from the surface.

 

The blonde, Draco Malfoy, had been talking about his father for what seemed like hours. Ciel had been pushed to the very edge of the table, out of the way and sneered at for his mudblood ancestry. Ciel had been right, it was because his parents hadn’t had magic, not because he was a demon.

 

Ciel seemed to almost pout, stabbing at his food as he watched his peers from the edge of the table, but he didn’t say anything directly. He didn’t need to, no that would wait until later, when all the little pieces played right into the palm of his hand.

 

Until then, though, he alternated between smirking, glaring, and looking irritated as all hell.

 

Harry, for his own part, stared at his plate.

 

It was almost all very odd food, almost foreign looking really, and so much of it too. Ever since Harry had left the Dursleys he hadn’t necessarily wanted, but he’d never seen a spread for a king either, and this was exactly that.

 

“Potter!”

 

Harry looked up, the Malfoy boy was looking at him again, though this time not bothering to restrain the dumbfounded expression as if he couldn’t believe Harry was this dim.

 

“Yes?”

 

“Potter, you were with the mudblood on the train,” Malfoy said, motioning to Ciel, whose lips turned downwards again at the slur.

 

“Ah, yes,” Harry said, nodding slowly, but this apparently was not the right answer.

 

“Don’t you know that he’s not the right sort, Merlin, Potter, I’m not going to spend my Hogwarts career looking out for you.”

 

“I wouldn’t ask you to,” Harry said, still bewildered himself, but once again feeling that odd sense of disassociation and vertigo when he remembered a Hogwarts career was seven years. He’d be seventeen then, legally an adult, except he couldn’t picture himself as an adult even now.

 

Ciel, he remembered, had never made it close to adulthood.

 

Malfoy scoffed, a girl next to him, Parkinson Harry thought, snickered and leaned into him as if they were sharing a nice joke.

“I can’t tell if you’re dim, contrary, or actually a mudblood lover,” a darker, olive skinned, boy named Zabini said drily in a voice that was trying to be like HAL’s but not quite managing it.

 

Well, the Dursleys had always said Harry was stupid.

 

And there were people still glaring at the back of his head, as if they were personally offended that Harry had dared to get himself sorted in Slytherin, when he’d had no real choice in the matter at all.

 

Harry glanced at the staff table, noting that they were all still sitting, the school speeches seeming to be over at the very least. He…

 

He didn’t necessarily want to go back to London, not yet at least, that seemed more trouble than it was worth. Still, he missed it already, he missed knowing where he was and where he stood and just not being here…

 

Suddenly, he was too exhausted to deal with any of this anymore.

 

He stood, clambering out of the bench as he did so and brushing off his robes.

 

“Potter, where the bloody hell are you going?” another one, Nott, asked, “Dinner’s not over yet.”

 

“I’m tired,” Harry simply responded.

 

“You don’t even know where the dorms are!” Malfoy balked, “Sit down, you bloody lunatic.”

 

“Then I’ll find it,” Harry said, fully intending to do just that, but suddenly one of the Slytherin prefects was blocking his path.

 

“Hold it, Potter,” the boy sneered, pushing Harry back into his seat, “Not on the first night. I’ll gather up all you firsties soon enough and then you can go wherever the hell you please. Until then, sit back down.”

 

And now there was laughter, from Slytherin and every other house beside it. Funny, if Harry usually pushed that hard he got his way, at least since the Dursleys, since HAL…

 

That was probably the issue, when push came to shove, HAL had always been there. And Ciel had no inclination of allowing Harry Potter his graceful exit.

 

His hand, the seal, ached more fiercely than it had in a very long time.

**Author's Note:**

> I keep moving all of my old things over first so as a result this is another old work of mine which I have not actively worked on for some time and don't really intend to. All the same, here it is.
> 
> Thanks for reading, comments, kudos, and bookmarks are greatly appreciated.


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